AWS re:Invent is a learning conference hosted by AWS for the global cloud computing community. 

For 10 years, users have been coming together to share the latest and greatest of cloud technology, as the in-person event features keynote announcements, training sessions, and certification opportunities. The event also offers 1,500+ technical sessions and a number of after-hours events.

The event is taking place from November 28th to December 2nd in Las Vegas, Nevada. Giving keynotes this week are WS CEO Adam Selipsky, Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of AWS Data and Machine Learning, and Dr. Werner Vogels, Vice President and CTO, AWS, among many others. 

Collecting data and enabling governance across deep space, mountains and the vast oceans, here are some of the biggest announcements made this year (audio, video):

Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” Technology:

Proving immensely popular in Amazon’s Go and Fresh stores, as well as inspiring Amazon One, its palm-recognition technology, the Just Walk Out technology lets shoppers enter a store, grab what they want, and get going.

Amazon Omics:

Amazon is coming to healthcare with Amazon Omics, a prupose-built genomic data analysis service to store, query and analyze genomic to help build the next generation of healthcare solutions.

AWS Clean Rooms:

Helping companies bring in data from different environments, AWS Clean Rooms lets firms securely analyze and collaborate on data sets without sharing possibly insecure information, helping firms better understand their own customers and allow joint data analysis.

AWS Supply Chain:

AWS Supply Chain is a whole new cloud app system looking to improve visibility and provide actionable insights and lower costs. 

The service provides real-time maps of a business’ supply chain, helping them leverage machine learning to predict any problems, as well as offer low-cost solutions.

Amazon Connect Expansions:

Powering more than 10 million interactions per day, Amazon Connect is getting a number of expansions, including ML-driven forecasting, capacity planning and scheduling.

Contact Lens is also getting agent performance mangement, and a new agent workspace with guided step-by-step actions.

AWS SimSpace Weaver:

AWS SimSpace Weaver is a new compute service that  integrates with top 3D engines such as Unreal and Unity to help companies run real-time spatial simulations in the cloud and at scale, without being contained by their hardware or managing infrastructure.

High Performance Computing (HPC):

“The scale of the cloud is redefining HPC,” Adam Selipsky, Chief Executive Officer of AWS notes, highlighting how customers not only need highly-tailored infrastructue at scale, but also one that is easy to use.

To this end, AWS is launching new Hpc7g instances powered by Graviton3E and EFA, in addition to new Hpc6id instances to power data and memory-intensive use cases.

Machine Learning Workloads:

AWS is also boosting its Inf1 sytem, which is ideal for smaller models, with new Inf2 Instances for EC2. 

With over 600 instance types for virtually every workload, the new Inf2 Instances offer 4x higher throughput at 1/10th the latency of Inf1 instances.

The new Inf2 Instances are powered by AWS hardware, including AWS Nitro, and the Graviton processors.

The new C7gn instances for EC2, also announced, are powered by Graviton3, giving huge advantages in network-intense workloads such as analytics.

Amazon Security Lake:

AWS Security promises “security and agility”, helping businesses detect and mitigate threats with none of the trade-offs.

To this end, the new Amazon Security Lake service will make it easy for security teams to automatically collect, combine, and analyze security data at petabyte scale.

Users will also be able to run queries using Amazon Athena, and integrate up to 50 partner analytics systems, including Amazon GuardDuty, to stop impending security threats.

Amazon GuardDuty is also featuring a new capability that adds container runtime threat detection.

Amazon QuickSight:

Amazon QuickSight, a cloud-native, serverless, business intelligence with native ML integrations and usage-based pricing launched last year, is now featuring a number of upgrades, including new operational paginated reports and ML-powered forecasting with Q.

Amazon DataZone:

Amazon DataZone is a new data management service to catalog, discover, share and govern data that features full integrations with key AWS tools for data analysis such as Redshift.

New Integrations:

The conference also introduced a number of new integrations to existing services, including the new Amazon Redshift integration for Apache Spark, and the new integration between Amazon Aurora and RedShift.

Machine Learning and AI:

Enabling thousands of customers across a wide range of industries to train models with billions of parameters, AWS gave a preview of Amazon OpenSearch Service for operational analytics, providing serverless analytics across all its services, and Amazon Aurora, which has been a huge success since its launch in 2021.

Sustainability:

Selipsky revealed that AWS is now  the largest corporate purchases of renewable energy, and wants to be 100% renenwable by 2025 – and being water positive by 2030.